COLUMN ONE : Is U.S. Stuck With Honey Subsidies? : Officials feel farm lobby’s sting every time they try to cut the tiny program. Fight illustrates why it is so difficult for the government to eliminate anything from the budget.

Thousands of bees are buzzing about the old warehouse that serves as their winter home, but Richard Adee and his workers pay no mind as they go about their business in shirt-sleeves. Walking outside with an air of confidence and no protective gear, Adee pierces a virtual wall of bees in the doorway as if they weren’t there.

“You get stung every once in a while, but you get used to them,” he observes matter-of-factly.

Adee, the largest beekeeper and honey producer in the world, son of a beekeeper and father of two more, knows how to deal with bees: You just breed the aggression out of them.

Adee can deal with Washington too. He is just as much at home within the corridors of Congress, sitting through hour after hour of arcane subcommittee hearings, as he is among his hives. You just learn to work the right levers.

Adee has had to learn. The federal government paid Adee and his sons $110,000 last year to keep bees and produce honey. That makes Adee Honey Farms by far the largest single beneficiary of the Agriculture Department’s honey subsidy--one of the smallest but most controversial and ridiculed government programs around.

The Clinton Administration is bound and determined to kill it. The honey subsidy is the only spending program that candidate Bill Clinton promised to completely eliminate during last year’s presidential campaign, and it remains one of the very few that President Clinton has proposed to eliminate as part of the economic plan he has presented to Congress.

But expert politician and master salesman that he is, Clinton may have met his match in Adee. Honey subsidies have been under incessant attack from critics of government waste for most of the last decade. Adee, president of the American Honey Producers Assn., has even been singled out for scathing criticism in speeches on the floor of the House. Yet the subsidy lives on.

“If we can’t kill this program, what can we cut?” asked an exasperated Rep. Dick Armey (R-Tex.).

Good question. In fact, the saga of the honey subsidy offers telling insight into why it is so difficult for the federal government to ever really eliminate anything.

And it may help explain why many in Washington are not yet convinced that Congress will enact specific spending cuts this year, despite all the brave talk about adding even bigger reductions than those in Clinton’s economic plan.

It may be a tiny program not worthy of White House attention, but Clinton and his advisers think it is silly to throw $16 million a year of taxpayer money at a bunch of beekeepers, and they don’t mind saying so.

“When we were putting the (President’s) plan together, there were no defenders of the honey program in the room,” Alice Rivlin, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, dryly observed.

Clinton is not the first President to take aim at Adee and his fellow beekeepers. During the Ronald Reagan and George Bush administrations, there were times when it looked like the subsidy was a goner. In 1985, Reagan eliminated it from his budget. In 1990, the Senate voted to kill the program outright. In 1987, Adee had to move to a motel just outside Washington for 17 weeks while Congress debated the program’s future.

The subsidy survived every time.

It outlasted its most vocal critic, the late Rep. Silvio O. Conte (R-Mass.), who delivered colorful anti-honey speeches on the House floor, attacking Adee by name. (Conte died in 1991.)

It outlasted Richard G. Darman, director of the Bush Administration Office of Management and Budget, and former Agriculture Secretary Clayton K. Yeutter, both of whom tried in vain to slash the subsidy.

It survived a highly critical report by the General Accounting Office, which concluded that the subsidy was not needed to ensure pollination of major American crops--the prime justification cited by honey producers to generate congressional support.

The implications for Clinton and the deficit hawks in his Administration are clear: It is one thing to advocate reduced spending in the abstract, but it is quite another to support the elimination of specific programs that benefit key constituents--or for that matter, to vote against the pet programs of other powerful lawmakers whose support may be needed on other issues.

To make such votes palatable, supporters come up with lots of reasons to keep each and every existing program in the federal budget. Supporters of the honey program have plenty of arguments.

Without subsidies, they say, the U.S. beekeeping industry will cease to exist. Valuable crops such as California almonds will not be pollinated properly. China’s beekeepers will take over the U.S. honey market.

Here’s the show-stopper: If the subsidy is killed, advocates insist, the nation’s best defense against Africanized honeybees, known as killer bees, will die with it.

“Beekeepers could breed the aggression out of those African bees,” Adee said.

Administration officials remain unpersuaded. “Everybody who does something that is subsidized by the government feels that it is worthy,” Rivlin said.

Maybe that explains why Rep. Charles W. Stenholm (D-Tex.), sponsor of a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget and leader of a movement to force Clinton to cut more federal spending, is a key supporter of the honey subsidy program.

Another key honey backer is Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who won praise last year when he announced that he was quitting the Senate to fulfill his campaign pledge to step aside if the federal deficit had not been reduced during his first term. (Conrad was quickly returned to Washington in a special election to fill North Dakota’s other Senate seat, left vacant by an incumbent’s death.) It just so happens there is a high concentration of beekeepers and honey production in the Dakotas.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy was an ardent honey supporter when he served on the House Agriculture Committee as a congressman from Mississippi. Or that Leon E. Panetta, the current OMB director and a former congressman from California, also voted only three years ago to preserve the subsidy as a member of the same committee.

“On the (Agriculture Committee), it is this way: You help me, I help you; you screw me, I damn well will screw you,” summarized one Administration official.

Already, Capitol Hill supporters are quietly lining up behind the honey program. It is all very low-key; Democratic lawmakers do not want to antagonize or embarrass Clinton. But a bipartisan group of 11 senators has sent Clinton a letter urging him not to kill the honey program, and the powerful chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. Kiki de la Garza (D-Tex.), acknowledged that he will fight the Administration’s proposal to abolish it.

“If it is up to me, I say it is a viable, responsible, needed program, and we should do what we can to maintain it,” De la Garza said. “If you are talking about balancing the budget, it is ridiculous to shoot at the honey program. You could do away with this program and not even notice it in the budget.”

To be sure, the honey program may have to adapt to more austere times. There is talk among farm-state lawmakers of replacing direct subsidies paid to beekeepers with stiff new tariffs on honey imports, especially from China.

Honey supporters, in fact, contend that this is fundamentally a trade issue. China, they charge, is dumping cheap honey in this country in an effort to take over the U.S. market.

“If the majority in Congress wants to get rid of the honey program and turn the American honey market over to the People’s Republic of China, I don’t know what we can do about it,” Stenholm said with a sigh.

Yet when all is said and done, it seems quite possible that the 3,500 domestic beekeepers who currently receive subsidies will still be getting some kind of government assistance long after Clinton is back home in Arkansas.

Said Adee: “I think we can win.”

Indeed, the honey industry is just a small cog in a powerful Washington axis of agriculture lobbyists and farm-state legislators, an experienced political machine that has kept the government in the farming business for generations. And the farm lobby takes care of its own.

The agriculture lobby has succeeded over the years by presenting a united front on subsidies. For example, a coalition of groups led by the Cotton Council and representing most other major crop programs was instrumental in saving honey subsidies in 1990.

The bigger crop programs are where the real money goes and where the real power resides. Clinton, a politically astute former governor of a rural state, knew enough not to go after them directly. So while his economic plan targets small, vulnerable subsidy programs, such as honey and mohair, it does little to curb spending on the big ones like corn, wheat, rice and cotton.

As a result, total federal spending on farm subsidies is expected to soar to $17 billion this year, up from $9 billion in 1992.

But the farm lobby does not want Clinton to get his foot in the door. That is why the American Farm Bureau, the largest agriculture lobbying group, and virtually every other major farm organization enthusiastically supports the honey program.

Farm lobbyists concede they are fearful that if Congress gets rid of the honey subsidy, it will be harder to stave off attacks on larger agriculture programs benefiting producers of major crops like cotton and peanuts.

“The traditional pattern has been to work together as an ag front,” said Farm Bureau spokesman Jack King.

“There is a strong feeling in the farm community that if you back off on one program, it would have a domino effect on the others,” added a House Agriculture Committee staff member.

Such tactics have made it virtually impossible to kill any farm program, even after its original purpose has been forgotten and its usefulness has come into question.

The honey subsidy, like many other federal programs that seem quaint or obsolete, traces its origins to national security concerns during World War II.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration had imposed wartime sugar rationing but wanted to do more to deal with sugar shortages. So in the midst of the war, the government began encouraging production of honey as a substitute sweetener. Munitions plants began using bee’s wax to pack ammunition cases.

Suddenly, beekeeping became an act of patriotism. “They didn’t even want to draft beekeepers, some actually had to insist that they be taken,” Adee said.

But the end of the war and the lifting of sugar rationing left U.S. beekeepers with mountains of unsold honey, and they turned to Washington for help.

In 1949, the honey subsidy was tagged onto a massive new farm bill, a landmark piece of legislation that created the framework for U.S. agriculture policy in the postwar era.

The honey subsidy has been on the books ever since.

Until the 1980s, the program cost the federal government very little money--and attracted almost no attention. But in the early 1980s, inflation and a flood of imports brought volatile prices and new competition to the honey business.

By the middle of the decade, the Agriculture Department’s complex formula for determining honey support levels was triggering massive subsidy payments to beekeepers.

What was worse, the economics of the subsidy program during that period gave honey producers a big incentive to forfeit their federal loans, forcing the government to seize their honey production as collateral and store it all over the country. In 1985 alone, federal warehouses were stocked with 100 million pounds of unsold honey.

By 1988, the total costs of the honey program had ballooned to $100 million a year. Soon, critics like Conte were coming out of the woodwork, calling for an end to the subsidy.

But the legislative process seems to be stacked against critics of existing spending programs, especially when it comes to farm programs like honey.

Omnibus farm bills, which include all of the crop-subsidy programs, come up for review once every five years. Each bill is really nothing more than a five-year reauthorization of the 1949 legislation. In the years between omnibus bills, farm programs cannot be wiped off the books, but they can have funding taken away, which is what Clinton is proposing.

Thus, after honey’s supporters agreed in 1985 to compromise reforms that reduced the program’s costs, the next battle over whether to abolish the program did not occur until 1990. That recurring five-year cycle gives the farm lobby and its congressional supporters lots of time to nurture support for honey.

“The farm lobby has what I call the chit silo,” said Armey, the Texas congressman who took up Conte’s fight against the honey subsidy. “For four years, other people come and ask farm people for support on their issues. The farm people say: ‘Sure, just remember to be with us on the farm bill.’ So then every five years, the farm people just go to the chit silo and pull out all of these IOUs they’ve been building up.”

Just when it looked like the honey program was out of the woods again, along comes Clinton.

Actually, Clinton stirred up the debate almost by accident. Last summer, as he was rushing to meet a deadline for unveiling his campaign’s economic program, he found that many of the spending cuts discussed by his staff had not been reviewed by his political allies and other key lawmakers who might be affected by the proposals.

According to a former campaign adviser, the honey subsidy had been discussed already, so it was quickly added to the plan despite its minuscule size.

Later, the Bush campaign had a field day with the honey issue, ridiculing Clinton for his “courageous” attack on beekeepers. And that, of course, made it even harder for Clinton to even think about backing down.

But as Adee opens up his beehives for inspection, wearing only a pair of gloves and a netted helmet for protection, it is hard for him to hide his frustration and anger with the new President.

“He came after us because we are an easy target. I’ve got the biggest beekeeping operation in the world, and I’ve only got 35 workers. This whole industry is just peanuts, just mom-and-pop operations,” he complained.

“I’m out working with the bees. This business doesn’t make any money. But Clinton must think we’re all out here driving Cadillacs.”